When the woman poured the spikenard on the head of Jesus, Judas, the virtuous Judas, forsooth! made objection. "Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence _and given to the poor_?" Why not, indeed,--for Judas is custodian of the poor fund. "Judas," returns his Master,--and there was pathos as well as rebuke in the words,--"Judas, the poor ye have with you always, and whenever ye will, ye may do them good." This was the first time Judas had ever manifested any solicitude for the poor. "But me, ye have not always." Judas was silenced; but he began to brood revenge. Soon he stole out and went to the chief priests. He had not secured the price of the spikenard, but he would indemnify himself by selling his Master! With what relish do we read the trenchant replies of Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees and Herodians who had leagued to "entangle him in his talk." Easily as Samson broke the green withes, did he break the verbal fetters they forged. "In the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage!" "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." What can be more admirable viewed simply as repartee,--as illustrations of the "dexterous leap of thought by which the mind escapes from a seemingly hopeless dilemma?" If one were to read such fragments of Gospel history for the first time, without the idea that he must attach a solemn and awful meaning to every word, how would he delight in these intellectual contests and hail the genius of the victor! After the besiegers, in the preceding incident, had exhausted their fruitless ingenuity, Jesus turns upon them with the question, "What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is he?" "The Son of David," they feebly mutter. "How then doth David call him Lord? If David call him Lord, how is he his son?" That ended the controversy. The combined forces of theology and politics retired in confusion, evidently looking, as Dickens said of the portraits of the Dedlock family, "as if they did not know what to make of it." They had lost the battle. One can imagine the evangelist who afterwards wrote the account, almost chuckling with inward satisfaction, as he recalled the scene and recorded the result: "And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day ask him any more questions." VII. Wit and Logic. "Who would say that truth ought to stand disarmed against falsehood, or that the enemies of the faith shall be at liberty to frighten the faithful with hard words or jeer at them with lively sallies of wit, while the Christians ought never to write except with a coldness of style enough to set the reader asleep?"--_Augustine._ WIT AND LOGIC.